About five clicks in from the main page of the vast PBS Web site is a little drag-and-click feature called “Match the Music.” It is a guilty pleasure that allows you to pair short snatches of famous works of classical music with images from equally famous paintings. Click on Bela Bartok, then click on Edvard Munch, and you can, for about half a minute, listen to the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta while watching a slow pan over “The Scream.” It is remarkably addictive, even for those suspicious of the old “What does this painting sound like?” approach to art. There are 12 paintings and 12 musical selections on PBS.org, and the immediate impulse is to approach it like an SAT question: Look for basic “cat is to meow as dog is to bark” analogies. Stuart Davis’ “Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors — 7th Avenue Style, 1940” is a busy abstraction of blues and reds and jagged shapes that suggests something urban. Natural pairing• Copland’s “Music for the Theater,” in which the clarinet seems analogous to the blue tones, the percussion to the red ones, and the whole thing feels cut from the same jazz-cool aesthetic. That’s an obvious, and perfectly dull, pairing. Far more interesting, though who knows what they say about music and art, are more perverse pairings that make no sense chronologically, stylistically or historically. Munch’s “Scream” should probably be paired with Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night.” But try putting it with Brahms’ Violin Concerto, and the “meaning” or apparent mood of the painting changes entirely. The simple descending chord that gives Brahms’ melody all its dignified sadness suppresses the violence of the painting; the scream of “The Scream” goes silent, and the horrifying warp and sway of the anguished, cartoonlike figure shouting madness into the void is rendered lyrical. Brahms’ music overwhelms the first impression and suggests a reflective reading of the figure: This isn’t madness, or the fear of madness, but the acceptance of madness and dreams and despair as simple and necessary elements of the emotional periodic table. It makes Munch seem knowing, and wise, about pain. Does this teach anyone anything about music• It probably says more about how the eyes and ears function, when employed together, than it does about art. The mind must reconcile meanings, even starkly different or opposed ones, and the reconciliation is often at the expense of one idea or the other. If nothing else, the game should teach all of us a certain impatience with the obvious, with all those tedious adjectives that cling to the names of artists and artistic styles — the elegance of Mozart, the profundity of Bach — that tend to shut down new or individual associations. And unlike many (perhaps most) efforts at introducing audiences to music, this little game allows the newcomer freedom to subvert the expected answers. “Match the Music,” which debuted on the Web earlier this month, was designed by California-based Rolling Orange Inc. as part of “Keeping Score,” a multimedia educational collaboration between the San Francisco Symphony and PBS’ “Great Performances” series. Although the classical music business has been ridiculously slow exploiting new technology to save itself from cultural death, this is a small and mostly promising sign of motion in the right direction.

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